And Then He Walked Navicular

I know all dogs are different, and Navicular is pretty smart, but god damn it's difficult to teach him to walk on the leash. It's probably exaccerbated by the fact that he's 7 months old and is excited by absolutely everything, and to his credit he's been easy to teach to shake, sit, roll over and OFF!, but he doesn't get the leash walking at all. I've tried changing directions as soon as he pulls, yanking him back when he pulls, refusing to move if he pulls, more kinds of treats than you can poke a stick at, and even jogging with him. He doesn't get it at all -_-

In other news, I'm still settling into my new place. It's the first time I've lived with another person for over two years and It's going fine. I guess I gotta remember the last people I've lived with were fucking crazy. I'm still in "Extended Guest Mode" though, so it might be a few months before I actually feel like I live here. Extended Guest Mode for all those who dont know;

- You still ask to touch/do anything in the house

- You try to be super quiet at all times

- You ask where your housemate has been if he leaves the house and comes back without telling you

- You clean anything within 30 minutes of making a mess. This is in stark contrast to when I lived alone, trust me

- You're scared to spend more than 7 minutes in the shower

- You resist the urge to eat housemate's food, even if he says it's fine

- You freak out if you spill something on the carpet

- You try to ask permission before having anyone over/visit

I've also definitely decided I will get a Thinkpad X1 carbon when I have the money, and I will throw Xubuntu onto it and it will be my Uni software development machine. I like my thinkpad Edge a lot, but it's too heavy, and the paint is starting to flake off the lid. And it literally has the worst display I have ever seen in a notebook, to the point where I would not have bought the computer if I had seen the display before hand. Besides software engineering is a pissing contest ;)

This leaves me with no windows machine anymore, unless I install windows on this machine, assuming I dont give it away. I might. But to be honest windows has never excited me much. When I used the beta 2 of Windows Vista, after being bugged and annoyed by constant moronic dialogues (Allow msconfig to run? Why yes I'd like it to run because I JUST TYPED IT INTO THE RUN DIALOGUE BOX DIDN'T I?) and it crashing on my very ancient P4 2.8 Ghz box because it had driver issues (driver issues pretty much mean a system crash at random unpredictable moments) I bought my Macbook pro in 2006, and my iMac in 2009, my Thinkpad was kinda a stop gap because I didn't own a decent laptop last year which I needed for Uni (The Macbook Pro's hdd was toast by then, and I couldn't be bothered fixing it) so I used windows on it for about 9 months, and windows just has zero appeal to me.

Anyway I'd better go jog now

And Then He Found a GTK3 Version of ClearLooks

Ok after about three months, I now have my Xubuntu desktop set up how I want. I'm surprised that I haven't nuked the install yet - but the fact that most development tools run on it, plus the wonderful terminal means it's sticking around:

I had to find a version of Clearlooks that was ported to GTK 3 though, seeing as the Gnome developers apparently went insane after the release of Gnome 3 and decided to not port any of the existing themes. I think most Linux desktop environment themes are just gross, Clearlooks is the only one I can stomach. Then I adjusted the window borders to something.. I can't remember what.. it's on XFCE look though (I think it's called axe), turned on display compositing, and changed the font to URW Gothic, because the default font is difficult to read which a lot of anti aliasing (and my Thinkpad has a whopping 1366x768 stretched across 14" of goodness. hot hey?)

The result as my mate pointed out, looks like a strange version of OS X. Which is probably true seeing as I've had a mac as my main machine since 2006 ;-]

And Then He Used Thunar

After using XFCE as my main desktop environment for over a month now, I've concluded that while it's mostly good, there is one aspect of it that needs much work.

It's Thunar. And it totally blows. Let me explain why;

For a start, it's unnecessary. XFCE is not, and never will be, as light weight as LXDE (see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_desktop_vitals&num=1 ). Therefore the argument that a new lightweight file manager needed to be written from scratch is ridiculous - What has resulted is a large amount of wasted effort to produce a file manager that is severely limited in its functionality. If a user needs a seriously lightweight system so badly that they are going to care about the file manager, they will use LXDE, not XFCE.

What should happen is the porting of Nautilus from Gnome 2.x, a much more fully featured file manager, and in my experience, not too heavy a footprint to warrant writing a new file manager. Unfortunately I can't, because installing Nautilus makes my Xubuntu system incredibly unstable, not to mention you need to remap every single menu item from the main panel.

So if we overlook the fact that Thunar shouldn't exist in the first place, we are slapped in the face with how fucking terrible it is at odd moments:

- The name is stupid. I understand like how like, totally like lame a name like “File Manager” is and like how awesome and cool like a Nose God Thunar is. But seriously did your twelve year old name is? To add further insult to the injury, the black and white logo from the about screen looks like it was cut and pasted from some geocities website:

Urgh.

- The main window is really ugly too:

Notice how the side pane extends the full height of the window, yet the navigation bar mysteriously starts at the top of the directory view pane? Why? It just looks odd. The navigation bar should be above the side pane and the directory view pane. And the navigation buttons are rounded, rather than arrows pointing into each other. This immediately doesn't make it obvious what you're looking at is a directory, and virtually every other linux file manager on the planet does the arrow layout. It's like the godamn hipster of file managers.

- There are no tabs. Seriously what is that like, 15 lines of code to implement? Come on.

- Wanna see the size of my folders brah?

That's right, you are literally seeing, the size of my folders. Not what's in them. How retarded is that? Why the hell would anyone EVER want to know the size of the actual folder rather than the size of it's contents. I can't even change it to something more useful like “number of items” because Thunar is so impoverished for functionality. Also how is a "/" 4.1 kB? That seems huge.

- Thunar is unable to remember the size and location of windows. Annoying.

- Thunar has virtually no support for removable media. You can mount/unmount and browse them, and that's pretty much all folks. You cannot format them, view or use any special permissions and half the time, you can't eject a mass storage device because something is still using it, despite Thunar giving you no clue what that something actually is. Also, certain removable media stays greyed out in unmounted mode on your desktop for weeks even after it has long been physically removed from your system.

- When you make an alias/link in Thunar, if you move the original file, The link no longer works.

- There's no “undo” option.

- There's no merge option

- Contrary to the “Linux philosophy”, an excuse given by my best friend whenever I moan about annoying I find many aspects of open source software, Thunar is almost Mac like in its inablity to be customised. Go ahead, open up the preferences menu and take a look for yourself.

- Thunar has extensions, of which exactly zero of which are desirable. All I want is drop box. Seriously.

And that's it for now, I have been compiling a list of what I found annoying over the last week, but it's mysteriously gone and Thunar has no menu for recently viewed documents. Urgh.

And Then He Got a Puppy

I'm finally all moved. It wasn't as painful as last time, but still pretty inconvenient and annoying to do in the Australian summer.
My housemate got a puppy too:

Here is Navicular. We call him Navi for short:

He is a great dane cross mastiff. He's six months old and already getting pretty big. It's been adorable to watch him see/use stairs for the first time, a sliding glass door and beach waves. I chew on his ears whenever we wrestle, and he's started chewing on mine now.

And Then It Got Done

There. That wasn't so hard. Now:

JunkRoom

Bedroom

Bathroom

Kitchen

Laundry

Living Room

Notice the sexy brown carpet? Nice hey?

And Then He Started Packing

Having a spare room is a dangerous thing.

I was going to be strong and keep mine as a study. But it's kinda darkish (Its one window doesn't get much sun) and it gets damn cold in winter. Not to mention despite being on the third floor, it has a view of 1) the car park below and 2) the apartment building next to me. Hardly inspiring for a study.

So when a room has these risk factors, it develops "Junkroom Syndrome" Just vacuumed and can't be arsed putting the entire vacuum away? Stick it in the junkroom. Not using your desk anymore but dont want it in your living room where it looks weird? Junkroom. Dresser you dont use? Junkroom. Taken down those ugly curtains that came with the apartment but got no where to put them? Junkroom. Bags of bills and other documents that you're not quite sure what to do with? Junkroom.

This ladies and gentlemen, is my Junkroom:

Horrifying isn't it. And on the junkroom badness scale, it's only about a 2. A single white 23 year old male student did this. Imagine what a 50 year old woman could do with two kids. It's terrifying.

Could I clean up the Junkroom and rent it out so I'm not so damn poor? Sure! Did I do that? Hell no I'm not touching all that shit!

So now that I've moved, I have no recourse but to tackle the junkroom. I'm going to draw up a plan after this blog post helps me procrastinate to slowly move. But it's going to start with the junkroom, or else I'll just end up moving everything in it, and displacing it somewhere at the new place. It's gotta go.

On the positive side, I've made the executive decision that I can probably hire a delivery van to move my house, rather than a truck this time.

Last time, the truck was comically underloaded. And it was EXPENSIVE. and extremely annoying to drive. My mattress is the largest thing, as long as that fits, it's all good. I don't really have any large items of furniture to move.

Also how crazy is steam under wine? It almost feels like you're just using a really shitty slow windows machine. It must have been a total pain in the ass to rebuild the windows API from scratch, so my (non existent) hat comes off to them.

And Then He Went To The Psyc Exam

I'm starting to appreciate the development tools that come built into linux, getting GCC onto my OS X machine was fairly annoying (I had to download the 2 gig Xcode first)

also >.<
tl;dr: A big long rant about Psyc2400

So there's been a hooplah over a course for second year psyc, psyc2400, aka Biological Psychology. Actually that's probably putting it too nicely. There's been a shitstorm.

Basically, a lot of people got marks back for an assignment, and they were unjustifiably low. And because they were so late in returning our marks, a large number of students who would have withdrawn from the course (to preserve their GPA) now cannot do so - they just have to wear these marks. This is poor management of a course that people are paying money for.
For this assignment, there was *no* marking criteria (you can instantly tell a competent lecturer vs an incompetent one, the competent one understands how to teach effectively and will always give you a marking criteria for assignments), this meant that people were effectively writing lab reports with absolutely no idea what the markers wanted. To make matters worse, whenever I asked my almost comically incompetent pair of tutors a question about it (They were unable to balance an equation correctly, and put down the resultant errors as rounding off problems. This is pretty basic year 10 maths people..), they were unable to answer my questions, or gave vague ones that smelt like "I dont actually know"

 The coordinator made available an alternate assignment for those who didnt' get the lab report results, an essay on language. Now after writing about 50,000 lab reports in the last two years, and the fact that the lab report assignment looked like load of horseshit, I emailed the coordinator and asked politely if I could do the essay. He said yes.

I got 95 for the essay, whereas every other student who did the lab report seems to have gotten 40-65. Dont get me wrong, I feel like I should have gotten a decent mark, I worked hard on the essay, it was 2000 words (making it a far bigger assignment then the basic lab report) and language is a personal area of interest to me, and I made sure it was very polished, but I dont think it deserved a 95%. Maybe 85-90. Infact getting such a high mark for it makes me feel like whoever marked it didn't even have a close look at it.

This unfortunately is not an isolated incident that is the tragicomedy of errors that is Psyc2400:

- The two main lecturers (#1 and #2, #2 is the course coordinator) appear to have zero communication between them.
- The lecture slides for lecturer #1 were never up in time, and when they were, they would frequently be incorrect as Lecturer #1 had made adjustments to them. Seriously how long have you been teaching this course? Get organised.
- The lecture slides and lab manual contained a litany of errors, ranging from the egregious spelling errors in every second slide to factual inaccuracies. In one slide, the cranial nerves were not labelled correctly. Then, the correction posted later was not correct, so there was a correction to the correction, and this was on a slide that HE TOLD US TO MEMORISE. Thanks dickhead.
- Lecturer #2 simply does not have the English skills to teach effectively. I've seen this before. What happens is everyone has this strange belief that it's somehow politically incorrect to tell someone that they suck at English. Sure it's rude, but it's even more rude to allow someone to make a giant fool out of themselves. I estimate I understood maybe 60% of what he said, no where near enough to learn the material. Two hours = wasted.
- The markers/lecturers are fucking lazy. We did our first assignment in week 4, and didn't get it back until the last week of the holidays. That's SEVEN WEEKS TO MARK A MULTIPLE CHOICE TEST. Then we didnt' get our second assignment back until TWO DAYS before the final exam, too late to pull out if you bombed at it
- Lecturer #2 would frequently make excuses that he was busy with honours years students, and this was an excuse for his tardiness in relation to replying to students' questions. What are you, a 14 year old? Let me explain time management to you: Time is a finite resource, when you allocate it to something, you dont magically get more of it elsewhere. If you take on the responsibility of looking after honours years students or other courses (I'm going on the daring premise here that you are in fact, not a slave, and not under duress because your daughter is being held hostage in a bunker in afghanistan) Then people will assume that taking on this responsibility means you have the time to do a good job at it. University courses are touchstones to our future careers. Treating it like a hobby is fucking insulting to all of us.
- This course was by far the most expensive out of the four we did this semester. By a large margin.
- We have received NO FEEDBACK for ANYTHING. Just extremely late marks. What areas do I need to focus on for the exam? Who knows. I have no feedback!
- The blackboard site is insanely disorganised, it's incredibly difficult to find anything.

What's happened as a result of the huge number of complaints? An email this morning says apparently some psyc coordinators are going to sit down with the coordinators from Pysc2400 and tell them how naughty they've been and slap them on the wrist.
Ideally the solution is to remove lecturer #2 from being the course coordinator for *anything*. But you're stupid if you think that will ever happen - I've heard students from years above complaining about how terrible he is. If any of the powers that be at Newcastle uni had the balls to do something about it, it would have happened already. Think about it, you try to fire him because of communication issues, he turns around and slaps you wtih a discrimination lawsuit. It simply wont happen.

I think I'm cross about it because I *really* like biological psychology, but undertaking this course was like receiving a christmas present, and finding a chunk of coal inside. Blah.

And Then He Got Nostalgic

So I have an unhealthy fascination with old operating systems, and I have been interested in Apple's A/UX lately

Turns out Mac OS X is the second, not the first Apple operating system to be based on UNIX. Circa 1989 they had a special apple branded version that could run Classic Mac OS applications, had a terminal (called the CommandShell) and could even run the X11 window system.

So in 1989, Apple already had an operating system with preemptive multitasking (for the UNIX compliant applications), native multiple user support without using At Ease, a highly extensible POSIX compliant underlying system and a Mac OS interface running on it. I wonder why Apple never seriously considered using it as the basis for the Classic Mac OS replacement, although admittedly NextStep was a much more mature operating system with some far more compelling features (such as the postscript display layer and it's object-orientated programming language)

And Then He Saw The Relandscaping

It's too damn hot.

Seriously, I have my ceiling fan on full-bawl just to sleep.

On the plus side, the front of my apartment is being redone, into a nice grassy area now. It will look good. Shame it's Jesmond

Not that it matters anyway, I'm leaving in about three weeks. I haven't handed my notice in yet because I dont want people coming through inspecting the place when I'm trying to study.

I've also got to get a move on with trying to get rid of my stuff. If I was smart I'd try and do it now. I've got three years of living alone's stuff to condense into a sharehouse

The only things I really want to keep are

- My Coffee table. Because it took seriously two years of searching, and accidentally buying a glass one that got recalled because they apparently had a habit of randomly exploding. Thanks Fantastic Furniture!
- My Bed. It's annoying to requisition a queen sized bed. And to move it around.
- My Desk. Cause I need a desk to study at
- My Samsung TV. It was expensive, and I happen to be very attached to it. It has DLNA, and will play pretty much any file format known to man. This was opposed to the Sony I looked at which was MORE and didn't have DLNA, and doesn't play anything, and had an incredibly uncomfortable to use remote. And it didn't even look that nice. Sony Fail.
- My Uni stuffs. Like my laptop and books and whatnot
- My clothing, and bedding


And taht's pretty much it. I estimate I will be getting rid of... well a shitload of things. Actually now that I think about it, I'm going home on January the 14th for a week, if I was smart I'd take with me a bunch of stuff that my parents can store. Even though they're moving. But that will be their problem when they move and not mine :D

And Then He Got Some Marks Back.

I got 90/100 for my Psyc2600 Personality lab report, which makes me even more conflicted about changing degrees and throwing my marks over the previous two years away, and changing to a mathematically based degree which will probably not play to my strengths and I will struggle with.


uurrgghhh.

And Then He Saw The Price

$470 dollars? Are you fucking kidding me? I swear whoever prices products for Australia is drinking too much. Unless you have an axe to grind, why would anyone get a plasticky, samsung tablet with a resolution so high I dont care, with virtually no apps and my previously aggrieved Android on a Tablet OS, when $60 more gets you an iPad 4? Fail.

And Then He Wanted a Computer That Doesn't Exist

I need to purchase a new computer next year.

Well ok I dont need to, but I am going to anyway. My requirements are fairly simple:

- I would strongly prefer a Mac
- Probably a laptop
- Decent graphics to run games

Dont get me wrong, I like my Thinkpad Edge 420, Buttt


Things I dont like about my Thinkpad Edge 420:

- The red rubber is waaayyy easy to scratch off. Infact the lid looks pretty tacky now
- The build quality has absolutely nothing on my Thinkpad T40. Although that was a fairly expensive laptop back in the day, come on. It's 9 years newer.
- The 1366x768 display is literally the worst display I have ever ever seen with my own two eyes. And I *own* it. It's patchy and the backlight illumination literally doesn't go to the edges. If I had seen this laptop in person before I bought it online (it was on crazy special) I wouldn't have purchased it.
- It's light, yet has the strange condition of being incredibly Thick. I call it my Thickpad. Seriously it's huge.
- It has NO CAPS LOCK LIGHT. This is wayyy more annoying than you'd think.
- THe charging light only has green and.. green. I have no idea if it's charged/charging/nearly dead by looking at it. It's all the same.
- When snapping a CD into the drive tray, you always feel like you're about to snap it off
- No USB3 despite being a fairly recent machine
What I like:
- Was cheap
- Really fast
- The keyboard really is that good.
- Fantastic servicing


So when shopping for a new mac, I look at all the apple laptops. My budget will roughly be $2000.

Macbook Air 11'
- Too small for my needs

Macbook Air 13"
- Non retina
- Good size
- The more expensive model only has 256 gigs of hdd storage, adding 512 adds FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE dollars to the price
- Integrated graphics.
- Somewhat expensive for what you get. The top model here.

I dont really want the non-retina Macbook Pros. They have optical drives which I never use, and non retina macs will probably look rather out of date in 2 years time.

The 13" Retina Macbook pros all have integrated graphics :/ What is so "Pro" about a $2k Laptop with integrated graphics? Get your shit together Apple.

The 15" Retina Macbook Pros all have discrete graphics that can barely keep up with screen. Trust me, playing any kind of game is not a pretty experience on my friends machine. And they're all pretty damn expensive

So I guess I want a 13" with a decent graphics card. Which doesn't exist.

Blah.

And Then He Wrote Crap at 5am

It's 5am and I just finished work. The joys of shelf stocking :[ To make things more annoying, I have to pick up and drop off two of my work colleagues. Which I dont mind, but it adds an extra 15 minutes each way.

Ok I think I have finally settled on XFCE. It's mostly like Gnome, before Gnome went insane and wanna-be-tablet-interfacey:

To the right are my applications, notifications and the system menu, and two the right is the window list. This is after trying out a Mac OS X like dock panel at the bottom, but I find this interface a better use of the limited space on my Thinkpad's 1366x768 screen. The panels autohide. Neat huh? I like how  a usable linux desktop interface looks exactly the same as when I first used Ubuntu back in 2004. They need some designers. Badly. And talented ones, or you end up with the pure ugly of KDE.

I want to go to bed, but I'm going with a friend at 9am to get his car serviced, and we're going to watch a movie. I bet I'll fall asleep in the cinema :/

And Then He Tried Gnome

Dear Gnome 3.6

You resemble an ATM from 2002 and a demented iPad smashed together, and you are truly awful to use.

-- Matt

And then He Was Typing Lots

*sigh* My BtrFS partition corrupted itself and died. Why is such an unstable file system included in the Linux kernel? For shits n giggles I suppose. Anyway back to Ext4 I guess. I'm also annoyed by how terrible each of the desktop environments for Linux that I've tried are, Gnome 2.x seems to be the most usable for me, which is sad considering how antiquated looking and feeling the whole affair is. I could write several thousand words on why I think each of the major linux interfaces fail so badly, but I wont -_-

ANYHOW

I'd like to talk about the Microsoft Surface. I'm talking about the Microsoft Surface from the perspective of being Australian, so I'll talk about it as such.

ANDROID'S TAKE

First of all, Tablet manufacturers need to understand the nature of their products' relationship with the iPad. Annoyingly, too many to date have treated the iPad like the elephant in the room, and this has resulted in spectacular failures a la the Motorola Xoom or virtually all of Samsung's tablets. They have treated their product just like the treat their android phones. It's easy to see why - Android phones are definitely a great alternative to the iPhone, intact I own one and prefer it over my iPhone.

Android on a tablet is utter dogshit. It's slow, and it's painfully obvious that it's the phone version, stretched to make it larger, with a few "oh i guess we have to" tablet features thrown in. It's absolutely a non starter, and I think google is not serious about making a great tablet OS. Anyone who says otherwise has yet to convince me, and I've used it *a lot*. I could write an extravaganza on what I feel are the failings of Android on a tablet, but that's not what I feel like writing.

On top of Android being fucking woeful to use on a tablet, we have android tablet manufactures who seem to assume that tablet android will be competitive like the phone version is, and pricing their tablets the same as the iPad, despite in many instances, having considerably inferior build quality

Let's be real here. Honestly real. You walk into a shop. You're a dummy. You don't even know what the difference between android and iOS is. You see two tablets. The SAME PRICE, one has a nice aluminium build, is easy to use, has a tonne of apps, and is the same tablet many of your friends have. The other is ugly, works very strangely (seriously have you watched a novice try to work an android tablet?) and does not have many tablet optimised apps. Which one are the going to buy here? The proof is in the pudding buddy, at my university I have seen a grand total of three, count 'em THREE android tablets. All three were Nexus 7s too. This is opposed to a shit storm of Apple iPads.

So want to sell an Android tablet? Making it cheaper than the iPad is your first priority. If you come out with a tablet for $499, you've fucking failed already. No customer is going to care that your tablet is faster, has a better graphics chip, supports more radio bands or has a kevlar strip on it, it's a non starter. They will care that your tablet is the same price as the nice tablet everyone else has, and they will buy the iPad instead. Case closed, as the numerous Android tablet flops demonstrate, it's as simple as that.

The Nexus 7 stands as a solution to this: it's ridiculously cheap, and its success is reflected in the fact that i've actually SEEN them in the wild here in Australia.

WINDOWS TAKE

Anyone noticed how Apple like they're trying to be? I mean, Apple is making a shit tonne of cash, of course you wanna be like Apple! This can be seen as a good thing (like the daring Metro interface) or it can be bad (not releasing the SDK for Windows Phone 8 until launch so there are zero third party WP8 optimised applications).

Microsoft Windows 8 RT is an interesting take on what a tablet should be, and from my perspective presents a number of key advantages over an iPad:

1) It's a scaled down computer OS rather than a scaled up phone OS. You can multitask, you have quick access to functions via charms, you can run two applications side by side. iPad does none of that (and No, the iPad does NOT multitask. Don't be fooled into thinking it does.)

2) It has a USB port. You tried moving files from a computer to an iPad? makes you wanna cut your wrists hey?

3) Office RT will mean that you can get real work office work done on a  tablet. You can be that Office RT will be really, really good.

Unfortunately they've priced it the same as the iPad, positioning it as a direct competitor.

Like I said originally, customers will walk into the shop, see the Surface and iPad side by side (remember the surface doesn't come with the keyboard as standard). Apple understands the value of something looking good, because their entire business model is based on selling expensive, high margin hardware to cashed up twats (noticed how dumbed down Final Cut X is? Or how they don't give a shit about nichey, high end products like the Mac pro anymore?)

The point of the Retina display is it looks great, even to a cashed up twat with no idea about technology. And no multiple applications at once means said cashed up twat has quite a usable, unconfronting device to use.

By pricing it the same (or more expensive than an iPad in Australia) they are basically shooting themselves in the foot. The 1366x768 display, ignoring all the "it's more readable" bullshit by Microsoft, combined with the boxy, plasticky look of the device, are going to seriously work against it.

So basically I think that the Surface has the potential to fundamentally be a much better device for people are actually know how to work efficiently with technology, but at this price I doubt it will take off. I fearlessly predict price cuts in the near future.

And Then He Ate Sushi

My last ever assignment for psychology is now all done. Sad D:

I also went to Kitami japanese restaurant. The sushi was ok (I like the heavily americanised Sushi Revolution more) but the green tea ice cream was wooonderful. And expensive, but still, you pay more for nice things. It's just how it is.

And then He Got Distracted Some More

So I made steamed mussels and cous cous for dinner, which left me insanely hungry afterwards, so I went and ate a bunch of vitaweets and avocados. I'm so bad hahaha

I've avoided doing my essay so much. I wrote about a page for it literally about 6 weeks ago, and I haven't really done anything since. I was going to work on it today, but I keep going out to do things with friends, plus I have work all the time so it's kinda hard to work on it. I have no self discipline as my after dinner binge confirms :] It's due Wednesday night. It's due while I'm at work. how much dooes that suck? So I've just got tomorrow and wednesday before 8pm to finish it. Blah.

I'm going back out now :]

And Then He Finished

My last ever Psychology lab report is doneskis. :]

It's a beautiful day today too.

I think I'll go for a jog

I'm excited about Software Engineering still. (but not the maths)

And I'm looking forward to working on my language essay a little more. My last assignment in my B. Psyc programme.

>=D

And then He Got an Email from Admissions

So i just got an email back from admissions, and my GPA roughtly corresponds to an atar of 95, so that  rpetty much confirms that I will be doing software engineering next year... how exciting.

Except the maths part. Fuck maths.

And Then He Was Annoyed At How Windy It Is

So I've tried drinking lots of water when I eat. Like eat mouth full of food / Then sip of water.
It works. For like, 30 minutes. I feel totally full. But then I get cramps and have to go pee every 5 minutes for the next few hours. So maybe not such a good idea.

I had two, count 'em, two weetbix. I'm so hard core. Now I'm looking at the clock and wishing 12 would roll around so I could eat sooomeeething. The first two days of El Diet were easy, now it's day three and I can't stop thinking about foooooood

I was going to go for a jog too, but it's freaking cold, and really windy, so I'll probably just wait it out and see if it gets any better.

And my Psyc2600 Lab Report is due tonight. I've done the first draft. I'm fairly happy with it, but when ever I write something, I make a stack of notes all over it, and going over those and fixing what I thought were issues at the time I was writing it will probably take the rest of the day. Sometimes for example, I'll write something that I know I've read somehwere, but to avoid interrupting my train of thought I wont suddenly stop and go look for the reference, I'll just make a note to stick one in. Fixing up that shit can take hhouuuurs, especially if you dont have access to the journal database it's on.  And I'm always wary about citing stuff that I havent' completely read, you never know when a tutor is going to actually be familiar with the reference you are citing.

Foooooooooooooddddd

-Matt

And Then He Got Stuck Into It

I just realised that I'm sad about my lab report. I've started really getting into it, and I've enjoyed doing psychology lab reports and essays. I know I'll get a good mark for this lab report too, but then I get all dissonant when I realise that i'm leaving it all for Software Engineering, and I shouldn't be enjoying it - if I am, why should I change degrees? Ahhh my brain sucks.

And Then He Ate Healthy

Healthy food isn't so bad if you enjoy cooking. Take this for example, it's spinach fettuccine with basil and baby spinach leaves, with some Gorgonzola cheese and crushed pine nuts and pistachios. And a tiny bit of cream and pepper. mmmm

I've also decided to be brave and try BtrFS on my xubuntu install. It is definitely a tad slower than ext4, but having multiple point checksumming of my data, snapshots, online defragging and all those other cool ZFS features makes it worth it, especially seeing as the cunts at Oracle murdered OpenSolaris.

And Then He Procrastinated

I'm still trying to not do my Psyc2600 essay. Nebulous questions do not make for fun assignments. I know some people I know enjoy the open endedness of an assignment like this, but I sure as hell dont. I'd REALLY like a marking criteria about now. I'd feel safer with one.

Speaking of social psychology, I really dont get the point of studying it so in depth. Not that I'm criticising its validity or right to exist, but when so much of the theories we are taught are open to extreme interpretation and have in my opinion, extremely questionable scientific justification, I just find it difficult to commit to memory. It's like I am memorising the wrong answer for half of this stuff. For example the basic question of do attitudes predict behaviour? Even that doesn't have a definite answer. So why do we spend two lectures on the subject if we aren't even sure if this is true? The pseudo mathemetisation of many of the theories also really gets to me, it's almost like they're only in the theory to lend it false credence. We're studying people, not mathematical formulae.  The strange fights that occur between researchers of Social psychology are similarly problematic - there will never be any end to half the the controversy, because there just isn't any solid scientific evidence to back either side up.

Blah. I'd better get back to it -_-

And Then He Introduced Himself

Howdy Chirruns!

So I should introduce myself. I'm Me (duh). I had a blog way back, it was good to write about being me (and probably incredibly boring to read) so I decided to do it again. Plus sometimes it's fun to trawl through the interwebs, and find an interesting blog... and infuriating when it ends abruptly - especially if it's been going on for a few years.

I'm 23 and currently studying Psychology. I've kinda wanted to software engineering, but I've never thought my maths was good enough. Then about a month ago (laugh all you want) I had a dream where a random chick basically said to my face that I was doing the wrong degree. I then reapplied through UAC to change to software engineering. I haven't told my parents yet either, I dont think they'll take it badly, but I should probably get some riot get and a fire extinguisher to be on the safe side.

I'm also moving out of my apartment that I've lived in for two years to live with a friend. He's getting a puppy (maybe a doberman) so I get cheap rent in exchange for helping look after a puppy (he works full time)

And I'm starting a diet. Not that I'm particularly fat, just ever so slightly chubby and it annoys me.

That's that's my currently situation in a nutshell. Three years of Psychology, I'm throwing away a decent GPA and friends in the course I've made, all because some chick in a dream told me to. In a strange way, I feel kinda relieved that I'm going to do what I've wanted to do for a long time. And moving house. And looking after a puppy. And dieting.

I hate moving. Especially if you live alone.
When I first came here, I had all my stuff in my faithful corolla. It all fitted. I could move from sharehouse to sharehouse at my leisure. Easy. Then I moved into an apartment by myself, and I've accumulated a frightful amount of shit. Sofas, table, coffee table, tv, tv cabinet, bed desks drawers etc etc etc, not to mention an entire kitchen full of stuff (I like to cook). I moved once since i've lived alone, and it was one of those rare things in life (along side getting teeth pulled out) that are exactly as stressful, time consuming and unpleasant as everyone says. I had four friends help me, but it still sucked big time.

This blog post is also helping me procrastinate from my Psyc2600 assignment. I liked Psyc2600, I got 89 on the first lab report. Then we got Lecturer #2, who was responsible for Lab Report #2.. I was warned he was "laid back". People apparently confuse "laid back" with "fucking lazy" - he didnt' show up to one of the lectures, had his lecture notes made for him by another lecturer, didn't bother to record the lectures he did give, and his guidelines for this lab report are a joke. The question of the lab report is "You are to write a lab report from the perspective of this study being run as a test of the independent nature of the theoretical constructs that make up the Five Factor model". What the fuck does that even mean.  He then MADE UP some correlations for us. And he literally cut and pasted half the the very scant requirements from elsewhere, infact there is a line, on the "requirements for the Lab Report" that actually says "Please see requirements for the lab report document" ON the SAME THING. Not to mention there is no marking criteria, he basically said "refer to the criteria for lab report 1". Lazy.

I can't wait until I'm all nostalgic about it because it was my last ever Psyc lab report. Blah.